On Friday, two Republican judges on a North Carolina appeals court nullified thousands of votes in the state’s recent supreme court election—a transparent ploy to overturn fellow Republican appeals court judge Jefferson Griffin’s loss to Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat who has served on the state’s highest court since 2023.
Griffin learned in mid-November 2024 that he came up 734 votes short in his contest against Riggs. Two recounts confirmed his loss. But since then, he has lodged complaints about the validity of the vote in Democratic-leaning counties, and argued that three categories of voters should not have their ballots counted, even though their votes were accepted as valid on Election Day and throughout the counting (and recounting) process. Specifically, Griffin targeted people whose driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers did not appear in their voter file; military and overseas voters who didn’t provide a copy of their photo ID; and voters who were born abroad to North Carolina citizens, but have not actually lived in the state. Notably, Griffin did not challenge similarly-situated voters in Republican-leaning counties.
Possible clerical errors in someone’s voter file doesn’t make them ineligible to vote under North Carolina law. (Many people registered to vote long before the state even collected this information in the first place.) The state Board of Elections has previously ruled that military voters aren’t required to photocopy their IDs, and in 2011, the state legislature passed a law explicitly extending the right to vote to the children of North Carolinians living abroad. But all together, those three classes of voters amount to over 60,000 people, and disenfranchising them should be more than enough to alter the result of an election as close as this one.
The elections board rejected Griffin’s challenge, as did a state trial court. But Griffin’s Republican colleagues, Judges Fred Gore and Hunter Tyson, were more sympathetic. In their opinion, Gore and Tyson ordered the elections board to remove from the final vote count the overseas citizens who haven’t lived in North Carolina, and to notify the other two categories of voters—military voters, and voters without driver license numbers or SSNs—that they have 15 days to cure their ballots’ “deficiencies.” If they fail to do so, their votes will not count, either.
Of the tens of thousands of votes Griffin is challenging, he has not identified a single person who was not actually eligible to vote under the rules in 2024. Neither have Gore or Tyson. In their opinion, they framed their decision as a kindness, noting that they “could order that those voters are without a remedy,” but had chosen not to do so out of the goodness of their hearts.
The lone Democrat on the three-judge panel, Judge Toby Hampson, criticized the Republican majority for brazen election theft on behalf of its ideological ally. “Changing the rules by which these lawful voters took part in our electoral process after the election to discard their otherwise valid votes in an attempt to alter the outcome of only one race among many on the ballot is directly counter to law, equity, and the Constitution,” he said in dissent.
Riggs at her appointment to the court in 2023 (AP Photo/Hannah Schoenbaum)
Riggs, a former civil rights attorney, has also recognized that Republicans’ gambit in North Carolina has national implications for democracy and the rule of law. “If people in power can decide that an election result stands only if they like who wins, then nothing that we depend on for our rights, our freedoms, our liberties, good governance, none of that works,” she said in an interview with Democracy Docket on Friday. “If we let this kind of anti-democratic effort take hold, we will not be able to contain it.”
Riggs has said she’ll appeal this decision to the state supreme court, which has temporarily blocked Gore and Tyson’s order pending appeal. Since Riggs is on the court, she will, reasonably, recuse herself from hearing her own case. Of the remaining six justices, five are Republicans. Unless federal courts intervene—Riggs has also indicated that she’ll seek to reopen parallel litigation in the Fourth Circuit—the makeup of North Carolina’s highest court will be determined not by the voters, but by the Republican members of North Carolina’s appellate courts.
Griffin lost narrowly, receiving 49.99 percent of the vote to Riggs’s 50.01. But he lost. Republican judges are nonetheless concluding that the numbers do not matter. For much of the conservative legal movement, the only legitimate election results are the ones in which they win.
An earlier version of this post included the incorrect byline.
